A Public Health Reckoning Is Coming
“We must learn to live with COVID in the same way we live with flu,” said British Health Secretary Sajid Javid during a Downing Street press conference last week.
The vaccine of common sense was thus injected into Great Britain’s veins. In so doing, the country stepped out of the COVID tsunami and climbed up to sunnier and clearer peaks.
With the skies ahead clear and calm, mandates and restrictions have now entered the history books.
The postmortem of the last two years is sure to begin now in earnest. We will thereby be confronted by failure on an epic scale, orchestrated by our expert class.
Nationally and internationally, too many extreme decisions were made in too short a period by too few people with far too little reflection on the broader impact upon society.
In pushing for their preferred remedies of lockdowns, mask mandates, social distancing—as well as flirting with vaccine passports and mandates—our experts intervened like never before in the proper functioning of a free society.
They have made themselves the inevitable target of future investigations and potential retribution.
The reason is simple. The costs associated with their preferred and most extreme form of social control have been enormous. The vast majority have taken the brunt of these policies and have been greatly impoverished in the process.
To pay for the lockdown, our experts relied on the support of the Bank of England. From March to November 2020, during the first phase of social repression, the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street printed £450 billion pounds (the equivalent of just over $600 billion). Taken together, at close to £900 billion, the Bank of England manufactured the equivalent of 40 percent of our gross domestic product while millions were asked to stop working.
In the meantime, Britain’s national debt skyrocketed, growing by a quarter to 103 percent of gross domestic product in less than two years.
As night follows day, inflation took off.
As the Office of Budgetary Responsibility reminded us in a research paperreleased on December 21: “[H]igher than expected debt interest costs reflect higher than expected RPI inflation in recent months, which increased to a 20-year high of 7.1 percent in November.”
To put these figures into context, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) tells us that household income has grown by seven percent over the entire 10 year period ending in 2020, or 0.8 percent per year over the decade.
Our experts have been responsible for generating so much inflation that the median family was forced to travel back in time, wealth-wise, to the great financial crash of 2008-2009 in real terms.
As the ONS tells us the poor, the young, and the old have grown markedly poorer in a very short space of time.
This mass impoverishment, led by our inoculated and protected class, is set to continue.
With interest rates currently at 0.25 percent and RPI inflation over 7 percent, bringing inflation under control would require a 3,000 percent increase in current base rate, at the very least.
As the Treasury’s “Autumn Budget and Spending Review” published in October tells us, “the fiscal impact of a one percentage point rise in interest rates in the next year would be six times greater than it was just before the financial crisis, and almost twice what it was before the pandemic,” adding that “one percentage point rise in interest rates . . . is estimated to cost an extra £20.3 billion in 2024-25, rising to £22.8 billion in 2026-27.”
To defeat inflation, in other words, interest rates would have to be raised to over 7 percent. The debt repayment would then be close to £150 billion ($201 billion) per year at least. The equivalent, it turns out, to the government’s current spending on education, defense, policing, and transportation. In short, it will not happen.
Some will say that emergency measures were inevitable. There was no alternative. Lockdowns, restrictions, and mandates were required because COVID was unknown.
Honest research will show, however, that many paths were open; that cheap solutions were available; that many lives could have been spared in preventive care along with our freedoms; and that it is our democracy that saved England from committing to further erosions of civil liberty.
Those who took so many arbitrary decisions, often so callously, have succeeded over a short period in largely controlling the official version of events.
However, too many people, across too many disciplines have seen their livelihoods, their families, and their reputations smothered over the two year period to January 2022 for the center to hold for long.
In the coming years, the pressure to release data, to understand this international Blitzkrieg against common sense, will become ever greater.
Already, we see demands from the British Medical Journal on January 19 for the release of all data available regarding vaccines, treatments, and policy decisions.
The editors of this eminent journal wrote, “it cannot be justifiable or in the best interests of patients and the public that we are left to just trust ‘in the system.’”
They added that “transparency is the key to building trust and an important route to answering people’s legitimate questions about the efficacy and safety of vaccines and treatments and the clinical and public health policies established for their use.”
Further, the British Medical Journal reminded us, “Big pharma is the least trusted industry” in the United States; that at least three of the many companies making COVID-19 vaccines “have past criminal and civil settlements costing them billions of dollars,” with one having pleaded guilty to fraud.
In Switzerland the federal data protection and information commissioner,Adrian Lobsiger, said his office has a duty to make contracts with vaccine manufacturers such as Pfizer and Moderna more transparent upon request, against huge efforts from the pharmaceutical industry to protect secrecy. The Swiss courts support the public information commissioner’s recommendation, and so will the public.
In the United States, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—JFK’s nephew and a long-standing investigative crusader—has written The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. It is among Amazon’s top selling books and joins a growing number of dissections that will allow the Western world to come to grips with the pandemic, the turns it took, and where the lives of millions of ordinary people fit in the grand scheme of things.
Questions about why the most expensive, extreme, and divisive avenues were sought when much better alternatives were available are sure to be at the center of this long-overdue quest for truth.
As more data are released and more investigated, it is very possible that the last two years will reveal our expert class to be anything but objective, honest, and competent. Quite the contrary.
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